Belief brings me closer to You, but only to the door. It is only by disappearing into Your mystery that I will come in.
– Hakim Sanai

In the late summer of the following year, Professor Freeman completed his translation. Tonight he is to come to the khaniqah and present his work. The Master is also to return this evening. He has been traveling abroad nearly the entire year, recently accompanied by Aaron and Rebecca. Their return has thrown us into a frenzy of preparation and joy.

Glad Tidings! My brother and sister darvishes are to be married later this month, and a feast has been ordered to celebrate the return of the Master and the confluence of all our labors.

As happy as I am that the Master will soon be here, and that all the companions will be together once more, I am most curious about the final translation of the Jinn i Nama, the Book of the Jinn, in which I have had some small part.

I have not yet seen Professor Freeman’s final draft, and from the beginning the difficulties of such a task thoroughly daunted us. The Jinn do not speak as humans do, but communicate directly to each others’ minds. They know the full meaning and context of each others’ thoughts as well as the full range of emotions behind them. It is as complete a philology as is possible of a language without words. They also cannot lie to one another, and thus have no concept of deception. And they are the second children of Allah; their thought encompasses past, present and future, though how far into the future they see is still a mystery.

Soon after we began the translation, Professor Freeman and I approached the Master with these concerns.

“How can I possibly do justice to such a work?” the Professor asked. “My mind is locked in the present.”

“Remember that this book was given as a gift,” the Master said. “And as such, since he knows your innate natures, he is also speaking to both of you through it.”

“But how am I able to help with the translation?” I asked. “I do not know Canaanitish. Why could not the Jinni have used a language we both could understand?”

“You have listened, but you have not heard,” the Master said. “You will know Canaanitish before the end. Did I not say that the tale would also translate you? It is the faqir who wrote the book, not Ornias the Jinni, and he meant it for both of you: One to decipher the words, the other to help bring forth the subtler meaning. Consider, O darvishes, that when he aided you by allowing your minds to see through his, he also read your minds and hearts, their distinctiveness and their similarities, but he already knew both of you. Do you still not understand? Time is not a veil to his kindred. The book was written before you both were born, but he wrote the book for you!

“Oh my God!” the Professor said.

So there is no need to fear, Shlomo! As you continue on the path, even the meaning of the words you thought you knew will reveal their hidden depth, and the tale will become the clearer still.”

The tale will also translate you!

The thought emboldened us. Did we not survive fire and deep water, storm and demons? We resolved to begin without delay. Here, after all, was the real treasure of our journey. Within its pages we hoped to glimpse a measure of living history, witnessed by a being that lived it, unaltered by time and memory.

“Begin as a darvish would when undertaking any new task,” the Master said. “Ask God’s blessing, and commit your affairs to Him. Then clear your hearts of all motives related to yourselves, for no blessing arises from anything in which selfish interest has a part.”

The Master departed on his travels the next day, and we were left without his further guidance. No doubt he meant for us to decipher the ancient tongue and its meaning by ourselves, but it was soon apparent that Ornias had written not only a history, but a cosmology.

Jinn-i-Nama I

And God, the One, made first the Angels, the Holy Ones, and they were born of His light, the first children of his thought, and they served the Lord and dwelt in the house of His mercy.

And the second offspring of His design were the Jinn, and they were created out of the fire of His will, and they dwelt in the Subtle Realm, near to Him, though farther than the Angels who served Him only. And the Jinn were given free will, both a blessing and a curse.

In the green beginnings of the earth we made our home, on a vast mountainous island in the midst of the sea. And the mountains burned.

Great fires spewed forth, and rivers of molten earth ran into the waters, so that the land was utterly surrounded by vast walls of steam. Here we thrived and grew strong, for God was ever with us, and we rejoiced in Him. Our fiery spirit was well suited to the land, and we dwelt in the great cave cities of the high mountains.

Yea, the memory of the Jinn spans the ages, and the Jinn do not forget!

“Verily, Satan has said, ‘By Your Honor and Grandeur, O Allah, my temptations will not depart from your servants as long as their souls are in their bodies.’ And the Lord said, ‘By My Honor and My Grandeur, never will I cease forgiving those who ask My forgiveness.’”
– A hadith of the Prophet (peace be unto him), recorded by Ahmad and al-Haakim

In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate.

O Lord, bestow on us Thy mercy, and provide for us a right course of action! Praise be to God the Highest, who has revealed the mysteries to His intimates and the subtleties of the Way of Truth to His friends . He it is that brings the day in its glory and the night in its beauty, and brings dead hearts to life by the perception of His eternity.

I, Ishaq, named the scribe, am commanded by my Master to set forth the Jinn-i-Nama, this Book of the Jinn, to which, by the mercy of God, my companions and I have in part born witness.

Therefore, I have asked God’s blessing and resolved to tell the full tale, so that the eyes of the people may be opened and the truth of the Jinn and the Subtle Realm revealed. For verily an Age of Wonder is upon us, wherein the two kindred, if they will, may know the love and mercy of God.

Thus, may Allah guide my pen, for by His will alone is the Truth revealed.

“I was a Treasure unknown then I desired to be known so I created a creation to which I made Myself known; then they knew Me.”

Tradition says that it is the divine response to the Prophet David’s query, when he asked about the purpose of creation. These are not the words of the Prophet Muhammad (SAW), and no chain of transmission is known for this hadith, whether sound or weak, as Ibn Taymiyya and others state. But the meaning is true and is inferred from Q51:56:

“I created the Jinn and humankind only that they may worship Me!” meaning “that they may know Me” as the Prophet’s (SAW) cousin Ibn Abbas explained it.

Since human beings were created in His image (as self-aware consciousnesses evolved in a physical body), all human beings are also hidden treasures to each other. And all have this deep desire to be known. So, all of us create our own little worlds, each according to his or her capabilities of love, talents, and gifts. Of course it is a limited and ephemeral world, not comparable with Almighty Allah’s creation, but part of our nature nonetheless :)

Here is a link to the first time I ever heard the word Jinn. It is a wonderful scene in the 1940 movie Thief of Bagdad, starring Sabu as the thief, and Rex Ingram as the Jinni (which is usually anglicized as “genie.”)

Forward to about the 2:58 mark, as Sabu opens the bottle he finds on the beach, and listen as the Jinni materializes as smoke and says, “Two thousand years ago, King Solomon, master of the all the Jinn, imprisoned me in that bottle.”

PS: There is actually a legend that in Biblical times, the King of Arabia begged King Solomon to help in controlling a wicked and powerful Jinni, an Ifrit, that was wreaking havoc within his kingdom. King Solomon came and by the power of his seal ring, given to him by God to control the Jinn, imprisoned the wicked Jinni in a bottle, or oil lamp in some versions.

Alhamdulillah! (Praise God!) Sang Raja Jin, the Indonesian translation of Master of the Jinn, has sold out its third printing, thanks to the beautiful new cover, and will soon begin its fourth. It is well on its way to becoming a bestseller there :)

Master of the Jinn will be translated and published in Croatia in May, 2009. The title is Gospodar Duhova.

Note: I am also looking for book publishers to translate and publish Master of the Jinn in France, Italy, Spain, the Spanish speaking countries of South and Central America (Spanish translation has already been completed),as well as Sweden, Denmark, and Norway.

If you know of any book publisher or book editor that might be interested, please let me know by email at:Irvingk1945 at gmail dot com

Bless you for your help :)

EBOOKS Note: The New Kindle 2 Book Reader has just been released from Amazon. Master of the Jinn is one of the 230,000 plus books that can be read on the Kindle, so if you own one, please buy it (it’s only $3.99) and let me know how it reads.

Master of the Jinn is also on the Mobipocket Ebook site for $4.99, one of the least costly books there. I have purposefully lowered the prices on all the Ebooks so that anyone can afford to read them . And you can download the Mobipocket ebook reader on your PC and many electronic devices, including PDA phones, Blackberrys, and other book readers.